“Jeeeesus…” she groaned as she paused to catch her breath. “Cirque du Soleil is so out for a second career.”
Resuming the stretching and twisting, she finally got her prize—the ability to check out the opposite—
“Well, hello…”
Digging her fingertips into a break in the carpeting, she followed the square cutout until she found latches on either end. Disengaging a compartment cover, she popped the panel free and found …
Toolbox? First aid?
A lottery win manifesting itself in a fully loaded Smith & Wesson?
As she navigated by touch alone, trying to decipher the shape and feel of what was inside, she was reminded of how much she appreciated her vision.
“Gotcha,” she hissed, digging her nails into the box and fighting with the hold to get the thing free.
When it popped out, she realized there was a handle on the lid. Dumb-ass.
Its latch was simple to pop free, and inside …
The cylinder was about eight inches long and an inch and a half wide. On one end there was a cap with a rough patch on its top, and inside? Party time.
This flare was her only shot.
Tightening her hand on the thing, she refocused on trying to figure out where she was going to end up—other than a morgue, of course. The problem was, she had no idea how long they’d been en route—but if they were taking her to Benloise’s house? Then they had to be closing in on their destination. West Point wasn’t that far from Caldie.
And this was Benloise’s doing.
Payback by the narcotics wholesaler for her little home invasion and redecorating gig. Which in turn had been her way of telling him to F-off over a payment issue.
That had involved Assail.
Closing her eyes—even though she couldn’t see a damn thing—she imagined that man, everything from his glossy black hair to his deep-set eyes to that body that should have belonged to an athlete … as opposed to a drug dealer who was probably going to take over the entire eastern seaboard as his territory.
For a split second of insanity, she entertained a fantasy that he would come after her and help get her out of this mess. And yup, that was awkward on so many levels—one, she had never relied on anyone before, and two, the whole save-me-big-man bullcrap was enough to make her want to hurl on principle.
But her pride was taking a backseat on this one: She knew waaaay too much about Benloise. It was going to take a miracle to get her free, and Assail was the closest thing to one of those she’d met. Too bad he wasn’t going to miss her anytime soon. They knew each other only because she’d been paid—partially—by Benloise to spy on him. Assail hadn’t appreciated that and had turned the tables on her.
Which had led to … other things.
Shaking her head until the pain made things spin, she reminisced on all that had been so important before she’d gotten ambushed in her own kitchen: the cat and mouse between the pair of them, the seductive threat he threw off, the erotic charge she got just by being in his presence.
All of that had been so fucking important.
The current roll of the dice had wiped that slate clean, however. Now she was in survival mode—and if that didn’t pan out, she just hoped her grandmother had something left to bury.
Because she wasn’t fooling herself. Benloise wasn’t going to cut her any slack just because she had been, for a time, almost like a daughter to him in some ways. She shouldn’t have pushed him. Temper, temper, temper; her anger had been her undoing.
God, her grandmother.
Tears threatened, stinging her eyes, making her crack her lids and blink to keep them from falling.
Too much loss in her vovó’s life. Too many hard things. And this was probably going to be the worst of it all.
Unless Sola got herself out.
As feelings too big and complicated to hold in threatened to short out her brain, she struggled to contain them … and the eventual solution for that was a surprise. She went with the impulse, however—in the same way she intended to use what she had found in the trunk wall.
Putting her only weapon down by her hip, she clasped her hands over her heart and bowed her head in prayer, chin to chest.
Opening her mouth, she waited for the rote passages of her Catholic childhood to resurface in her brain and tell her tongue what to do.
And they did. “Hail Mary, full of grace…”
The words formed a cadence, a beat like that of her heart, the rhythm uniting her with a whole host of Sundays in her distant past.
When she was finished, she waited for some relief or strength or … whatever you were supposed to get from this age-old ritual.
Nope. “Damn it.”
Words—it was all just words.
Frustration made her kick her head back, slamming it into the compartment—in just the wrong place. “Fuck!”